Dub Steps (29 page)

Fats found me sitting alone, on the bench. In the dark.

They had looked and waited, looked and waited, then started searching, and finally, there I was. Staring into the black. Thinking. Waiting. Fats said I appeared catatonic. He shook me by the shoulders, as in the movies, and slowly I came back into linear life.

His face swirled into focus. I rubbed my eyes. The lights from his still-running bakkie caused a pulsing needle pain in my head.

He berated me as he pulled me by the elbow to the vehicle. He talked of being irresponsible. How worried everyone was. He asked what the hell I had been doing. I couldn’t answer. He ruffled my hair like a brother. I saw tears.

As we pulled out of the CSIR I wanted to look back for a sign of Madala, but my head was heavy and turning it felt like too much, too far. ‘Ke mathata fela,’ Fats muttered, and as I gained awareness, consciousness, if you will, I realised that things were indeed pretty far from right.

I tried to apologise again, but my tongue failed to wrap around the words and I ended up mumbling some kind of dry, patchy sorry, at which Fats shook his head. He would have laughed, I am sure, if the residual panic wasn’t still swirling so strongly through his veins. Instead he clucked and muttered on in a combination of tongues.

We sped through the dark, Fats releasing his tension via the accelerator, swerving wildly past the pig corpses. The speed kick-started my sluggish heart. As I came fully and finally back I tried to piece it all together.

My conversation with Madala had stretched on without end, and while I could remember the facts of it, every argument and counter-argument, every explanation and nuance, I could not
remember him taking his leave or, in fact, the physical scope, the time range, at all. We had drifted forever and then Fats was shaking me and the bakkie lights were searing my eyes.

‘You been drinking, Roy?’ Fats eventually asked.

‘Actually no. Nothing like that.’

‘Well, what then? You been gone a long time, son.’

‘I can’t explain. Not right now. Later. I promise.’

‘Drugs.’ He hit the steering wheel. ‘Hack, nè?’

‘Fats, you gonna have to trust me on this one. Please, broe.’

‘So that’s what you’re going to say when we get back? That’s your explanation? Eish, Roy. You won’t pull it off. The kids are alone. All the adults are trying to track you. That was my fifth time at the CSIR.’

‘I’m sorry, Fats. I must have passed out. I don’t know what happened. One minute I’m sitting on the bench and the next you’re shaking me—’

‘But you can explain. You’ve just said you will explain one day. So don’t give me any of this I-don’t-know-what-happened shit. Nxa!’ He snapped his head straight. I sunk myself into it. In truth. In cold, honest truth, I couldn’t at that point in time have constructed any kind of explanation that would have made sense. Not to myself. Not to Fats.

And certainly not to anyone else.

And that’s how we left it.

When we got back to the farm I went straight to my house, asking Fats to humour me for a few more hours. I fell into a deep, shocked sleep, waking past noon like I had been on a binge. My head was heavy and the roof of my mouth was sticky and my stomach was wrapped up in a series of loose and painful knots.

I crawled to the kitchen, where the air was rich with resentment. I started with a formal apology to the girls, and then specifically to Fats for my lack of communication the night before. I then delivered a quasi-formal speech in which I laid out my case – which was, in a nutshell, that something extremely strange had happened to me while I was sitting on my usual CSIR thinking bench, and that
while I could piece certain threads of it together I was not yet at the point where it made enough sense to explain it to other people, and that please, please, I would be extremely grateful for the tiniest bit of mental space while I tried to figure it all out, and when I did I would most definitely explain, and no, I had not been drinking.

It was all I had, and it wasn’t enough. It would have served me better to have claimed booze or something similar that, while distasteful, had logic to it. All I had offered was hot air and pained shrugging and they took this seeming flippancy to heart. I was frosted out of things for a long time after – a frosting compounded by my inability to produce the promised explanation. I tried to let the thing dribble away, but the distrust lingered. I had been deceitful. I had deceived. I was deceiving. Everyone knew it.

The most obvious and immediate reaction was an increased adult presence whenever I was with the kids. Traditionally, a single adult would take the pack for whatever session was scheduled. It was a question of shared responsibility and the systematic generation of a precious slice of quiet time for each of us. But now heads poked around corners, looking for small, arbitrary things. Figures appeared on the horizon, watching.

The kids themselves were also cautious for a long time after the Great Roy Hunt. They were quieter, more watchful, less likely to hug and less generally present. Fewer knocks on Roy’s door. More wide, querying eyes.

I could hardly blame them. Any of them, adults or kids. But on the other hand I was completely lost within myself. My memory of the content of the conversation was precise, but my physical memory was shot to hell. I didn’t remember the sun falling, and no matter how much strained imaginative effort I put in I now couldn’t even bring the full contours of his face to mind. It was as if he had been erased in all the important areas. Regardless of effort, I couldn’t locate the sense of time. It was simply beyond my recall.

Was I mad?

Did Madala exist at all?

Later I set to with my charcoals and acrylics in an attempt at a
forced, detailed recapture. I started by drawing, in an elevated, receding perspective, two figures down below on a bench, small but precise. Five, six, seven pieces in a row from the same place. Then I tried to zoom in – to create the same figures from closer, from the left or from the right, but I could find no detail. The charcoal insisted on hard, broken strokes, on cut-outs with heads and arms but only slits for eyes, the broadest circles for faces.

Eventually I dropped the charcoal and the paints and the paper and resorted to a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil. I started writing the conversation down, word for word, and now there was no trouble at all. It poured out.
^*
In exact detail – precise and clearly formed. I had never been able to write in that way before. The flow became a stream, which become a powerful, all-knowing flood:

‘There are many things you can’t understand, Roy – your brain doesn’t have the capacity.’

‘You can’t increase capacity?’

‘I could increase the speed. Power. But it wouldn’t help. You have structural limitations that define what you can understand and experience.’

‘Sounds like bullshit to me.’

‘Think of a rabbit. Yes?’

‘Yes. A rabbit.’

‘Imagine taking that rabbit brain and stimulating it so that it ran at two hundred times its original speed.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, do you think it would be easier to explain the special theory of relativity to this rabbit than to any other?’

‘I’m the rabbit.’

‘You’re the rabbit. Even with more power, you have natural limits.’

Page after page after page. I didn’t stop to think or to remember. Not once did I need to reach in and pull out.

‘So is there life after death? Yes or no. Binary question. You have to answer.’

‘I can’t answer it until the definition of life is recalibrated. With your limited understanding of what life is, the question becomes moot. Whether I say yes or no, you will achieve no greater clarity.’

And God:

‘Humans need God.’

‘Why? I can see no benefit for the species from God. What has God ever done?’

‘The question is more what has he not done.’

‘Christ, you’re so fucking cryptic. I would take this conversation much more seriously, I would take it deep into my fucking heart, if you weren’t so cryptic all the time.’

‘I am explaining as best as I can.’

‘So, what, it’s my brain which is too limited to grasp the complexity of what you’re saying? Of why we need God?’

‘Exactly. Your most prescient observation yet.’

‘Fine, but you still haven’t told me why you want to be God.’

I scrawled and scrawled and scrawled and his answer – which made little sense at the time – became clear. Clearer, at least, than it had been.

Madala explained how slim the chances were of our little farm actually growing as we intended. The kind of lucky twists of timing and circumstance that would have to occur for us to actually be able to build our way out of our stagnant, inbred state of subsistence. Not only would we require what amounted to the will of the genetic gods to make it through the early phases, but we would require something far greater and more profound. We would need to stumble into a significant intellectual accident to prevent the knowledge and tools at our disposal from becoming old, useless pieces of paper and plastic.

He explained, several times, how far below rudimentary our collective scientific knowledge was.

How unlikely it was that any of our offspring would be able
to make the spectacular leap of imagination and intellect required to understand the maths and science behind the boxes we called computers.

‘God,’ he summarised, ‘is necessary. A certain level of ongoing divine intervention is the only route to ensuring that the collective legacy of man doesn’t just dribble into the soil. You will have no success without God.

‘Without me.’

At the time I remember being repulsed by his ambition, but as I wrote, it all appeared more logical.

We had only partially succeeded in educating the children. The more progress we made, the more obvious it had become how many large gaps there were – in our approach, and in the content we were attempting to deliver to our brood. As maths progressed past times tables we – the teachers – were having to teach ourselves too much. The day was fast approaching when it would make more sense to send Roy Jnr by himself into the archives to decide what to learn, and how to go about learning it.

The chance he had created for us, mankind, Madala explained, was the opportunity to reset the pile of sand. To, this time, take advantage of the power and depth of our new foundation. To grow into a new shape and form, to put our abilities and our potential to a new, defining use.

But we needed help.

We needed God.

I allowed myself to picture our grandchildren and their grandchildren and their grandchildren in the fields, perhaps not having the most highbrow conversation in the world and perhaps not communicating with each other across vast geographic distances, but maybe, instead, lolling back, listening to their sisters shrill in the trees and watching their brothers, the buck and the elephant and the lion, go about their own daily quests. It wasn’t such a bad view. The picture, despite its painful weaknesses, held.

What, I had to ask myself, would truly be lost should we let go,
should we sink back – not in panic and shock but in calmness and with love?

There were no easy answers. I pored over that single picture for months. I lifted the corners of the canvas and looked underneath, I searched deep, I made sure I took the very lines in each child’s face and broke them apart.

I found nothing other than life.

And what was so wrong with that?

My daughter loose in the grass, expectant and free, as a raw creature of the earth must be. My son wandered the veld thinking idly – not with the force and rigour of structured knowledge but with the freedom and indulgence of play; he is pleased and pleasant and calm. In enough control to be largely free from danger, free enough from danger to relax and explore and smile and fuck and eat berries and kill beasts for meat and … and … and …

Once I had put the full text of our last exchange on paper, I went back and made notes around the conversation, adding observations and details in the margins, inserting pages of footnotes and addenda, and so on. I chased down as many of his technical and scientific observations as I could. I confirmed that my molecular make-up and that of a flower shared the commonality claimed. Regardless of where I turned, his words rang true, like that big brass bell they used to use at the church up the road when I was a child.

I was structurally different. Even the twins, the most benign and accommodating of individuals, struggled with where and how to place me. Andile visited more often, came and sat with me while I drew. She let the silence run free, then sought gently.

‘It’s our turn again soon, nè, Roy?’

I broke from the rhythm of the lines. It didn’t seem possible.

‘For real?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t seem right. How old is Sihle now?’ I considered Andile properly, caught suddenly by the remarkable fact that this soft, gentle woman was the mother of my child.

‘He’s twelve, Roy.’

‘Twelve? Not possible. Last birthday was his eighth. He’s nine.’

‘Roy, look at me, sweetheart.’ I was on the horizon again, locked into the blackness. ‘Roy!’ It was a bark. A command. ‘Roy,’ Andile repeated. She leaned across and took my hand in hers, hers so soft and filled with electricity and life and potential. ‘It’s been two years, Roy, since we lost you. Two years, Roy. You’re still lost, my angel. We still can’t find you …’

Not possible. It had been a few months, four, maybe five.

Andile pulled on my arm insistently. ‘Roy, you’re our precious, but we’re terrified we’ve lost you. You’ve been sitting here for years – years, Roy – drawing these things and writing. I don’t know what you’re writing, but you must know it doesn’t make any sense to anyone but you. We’ve tried to read it, but it doesn’t even look like English. Roy, we don’t know what to do. If even you can’t find you, how can we?’ She was crying freely now, her lower lip wobbling all over the place.

‘They sent you here?’ I asked. ‘Assigned to mission Roy, eh?’